With Pervaiz and Mikey at CMAT
When Handsworth Helping Hands were clearing the gardens at CMAT (Centre for Music Arts and Technology) studios in Grosvenor Road last Tuesday 17 July I got talking with people who worked there - Pervaiz, Lucy and Mikey - about the work of the studios. That led onto a discussion with Mikey about the film and tape in my stepfather Jack Hargreaves' archive in a lock up in Sherlock Street in the city centre.
Mikey suggested it might make sense, in the absence of a Steenbeck machine, to digitise the collection's films and sound tapes independently, and worry about matching them later. They had the kit to digitise the sound and he'd explore what would be involved doing the same with the film. I made an appointment to bring samples from the lock up on Wednesday. I showed Mikey the sound tape 'carbon-fibre rods, picking up - pheasant shoot.'
"It's in good condition" he said
"We can digitise that"
I showed him a reel of the 16mm film also from the 1970s, this one with Jack's writing recognisable the can "'Out of Town' programme film made on Colonel Hawker and Terns."
As we chatted. I realised that digitising the film wasn't straightforward. Mikey and Pevaiz had been exploring possibilities - but after some circuitous discussion I realised they had no suitable conversion equipment nor experience of digitising 16mm film. Here's a passage from the internet hinting at the challenge:
If you have a box of old 16mm film, digitizing it is either dead simple or very difficult. The dead-simple option is to send the film to a transfer service...doing the job yourself is hard and time consuming, as no consumer-level dedicated 16mm film scanner is available. It's physically possible to scan 16mm film frame-by-frame using a 35mm slide scanner or a flatbed scanner that handles slides. But this approach entails endless cropping and reassembly....A maximum 18 frames per second for 8mm film means 1080 images per minute of movie...
No way...and here's another website offering a 'secret' method for digitising film after dismissing standard methods:
...Project the film and video it off a wall then put the video into an all-in-one Video to DVD machine. It still flickers! There is a huge array of cheap and expensive machines all purporting to reduce this flicker. Some of them work, however with such manipulation any detail left is lost for ever as these type of machines compress MPEG and digitise at one set low rate. We have stacks of Documentary evidence to prove none of these methods work. We use a proprietary based system which is a closely guarded secret and the envy of our competitors. This system produces top quality, flicker free film transfers which are a pleasure to watch with rich colour, contrast and crisp sharp detail. You can clearly see the faces in our films....
Later at home I phoned Simon Winter of Kaleidoscope. He and colleagues played a key part in uncovering the 34 original Out of Town videos that Delta will be publishing in October.
democracystreet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-bells-bells.html
We discussed the 16mm film in the collection.
"I know someone," he said "Kaleidoscope use him for digitising films they recover."
With Pervaiz and Mikey at CMAT
When Handsworth Helping Hands were clearing the gardens at CMAT (Centre for Music Arts and Technology) studios in Grosvenor Road last Tuesday 17 July I got talking with people who worked there - Pervaiz, Lucy and Mikey - about the work of the studios. That led onto a discussion with Mikey about the film and tape in my stepfather Jack Hargreaves' archive in a lock up in Sherlock Street in the city centre.
Mikey suggested it might make sense, in the absence of a Steenbeck machine, to digitise the collection's films and sound tapes independently, and worry about matching them later. They had the kit to digitise the sound and he'd explore what would be involved doing the same with the film. I made an appointment to bring samples from the lock up on Wednesday. I showed Mikey the sound tape 'carbon-fibre rods, picking up - pheasant shoot.'
"It's in good condition" he said
"We can digitise that"
I showed him a reel of the 16mm film also from the 1970s, this one with Jack's writing recognisable the can "'Out of Town' programme film made on Colonel Hawker and Terns."
As we chatted. I realised that digitising the film wasn't straightforward. Mikey and Pevaiz had been exploring possibilities - but after some circuitous discussion I realised they had no suitable conversion equipment nor experience of digitising 16mm film. Here's a passage from the internet hinting at the challenge:
If you have a box of old 16mm film, digitizing it is either dead simple or very difficult. The dead-simple option is to send the film to a transfer service...doing the job yourself is hard and time consuming, as no consumer-level dedicated 16mm film scanner is available. It's physically possible to scan 16mm film frame-by-frame using a 35mm slide scanner or a flatbed scanner that handles slides. But this approach entails endless cropping and reassembly....A maximum 18 frames per second for 8mm film means 1080 images per minute of movie...
No way...and here's another website offering a 'secret' method for digitising film after dismissing standard methods:
...Project the film and video it off a wall then put the video into an all-in-one Video to DVD machine. It still flickers! There is a huge array of cheap and expensive machines all purporting to reduce this flicker. Some of them work, however with such manipulation any detail left is lost for ever as these type of machines compress MPEG and digitise at one set low rate. We have stacks of Documentary evidence to prove none of these methods work. We use a proprietary based system which is a closely guarded secret and the envy of our competitors. This system produces top quality, flicker free film transfers which are a pleasure to watch with rich colour, contrast and crisp sharp detail. You can clearly see the faces in our films....
Later at home I phoned Simon Winter of Kaleidoscope. He and colleagues played a key part in uncovering the 34 original Out of Town videos that Delta will be publishing in October.
democracystreet.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-bells-bells.html
We discussed the 16mm film in the collection.
"I know someone," he said "Kaleidoscope use him for digitising films they recover."